Audiences, as we know, can’t get enough of a great bad guy — the kind we love to hate. The worse he acts, the more we stare. Of course, the fact that we relish a villain doesn’t mean that we’re on …
” tells the story of Arthur’s descent , but it’s clear from the outset that he’s a basket case, a kind of maestro of his own misery. He would like, on some level, to connect, but he can’t. He’s too far out there, like Norman Bates; he’s a self-conscious, postmodern head case — a person who spends every moment trying to twist himself into a normal shape, but he knows the effort is doomed, so he turns it all into a “joke” that only he gets.
More than that, though, the whole movie, in spirit, is a kind of origin-story riff on Heath Ledger’s performance in “The Dark Knight”: the comic-book villain as Method psycho, a troublemaker so intense in his cuckoo hostility that even as you’re gawking at his violence, you still feel his pain. Arthur and his mother sit around after hours, watching the late-night talk-show host Murray Franklin , and as much as we think Arthur should move out and leave his mommy behind, we hardly know the half of it.
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